Glam Media Plans To Expand Its Audience Beyond Women, So It’s Looking For A New Name

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As company names go, Glam Media is pretty memorable, but the name is about to change, according to co-founder and CEO Samir Arora.

Back when the founders of the digital publishing and advertising company were first meeting in December 2003, Glam was actually called Project X. It was only when the company started to focus on reaching women that it took on the name Glam Media in 2005.

So why change it now? Arora told me via email that the Glam brand has become tied to women and fashion, but with the success of Foodie (which launched two years ago, and saw 17.1 million visitors December), the company is starting to serve a broader audience.

For example, he noted that the Foodie Recipe app hit number one the Apple App Store’s Food & Beverage category during the Super Bowl, with a “Game Day” edition. So it’s time for Glam to go broader, and to find a name to match.

Just to be clear, though, it isn’t giving up on the Glam name entirely. It will continue to operate the Glam website and its other properties like Tend, Bliss, Brash, and Foodie — it’s just the company name that’s changing.

As for what that new name is, well, Arora’s team is working with agencies and going through the standard branding process to figure it out. In the meantime, it’s calling itself “NewCo” as a placeholder.

“Glam Media started in Silicon Valley 10 years ago as a platform called Project X, focusing on men and women across all categories,” Arora said. “It is now going back to its roots as a consumer discovery platform, and will change to a new name later in 2014, continuing Glam as a vertical focused on women, but building Foodie and other new categories for men and women.”

As an example of how the company might expand, Arora pointed to the Editions platform for curating content based on trending topics, which was used to create the aforementioned Super Bowl Game Day edition. (Not every curated collection is released as an app, but the best are, he said.) For example, here’s a collection of cheap restaurants in my not-so-cheap neighborhood of Williamsburg.

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Crunchbase

OverviewGlam Media is a privately held vertical media company that packages professional digital content with relevant brand advertising. It paired premium brand advertising with an initial set of 12 Content Creator sites at once to create a new ecosystem of distributed digital content.
Glam media currently operates across seven lifestyle verticals, including Women’s Style, Home, Entertainment, Men’s …

OverviewFoodie is an online platform that allows its users to browse, sort, and search over a million hand-selected recipes and restaurants. It works seamlessly across portable devices, so its users’ collections are with them when they need those collections. Users have the ability to obtain shopping lists for the grocery store and restaurant addresses for a night out through this platform.
The foodie …